9 October 2017/ Lesson 3: Topic 5 & 6

Topic 5: Problem Solving Strategies

• Creative, intuitive, insightful
• Requires hard work, knowledge, experience
• Tenacity, perseverance

Thomas Edison

• 1000 patents
• he built up with the company GE which he sold.
• american inventor, phonograph, the incandescent lightbulb
• 99% perspiration & 1% inspiration _ hardwork perceives your success
• considered a genius and patient guy, he said “genius is only an aptitude for patience”

Discussion Question:

What can Singapore do to fight global warming?

• Reduce, reuse, recycle more
• Use specific trash bags, and limit the number of bags for each homef
• Recycle home rubbish
• Stop buying products in plastics/ or using plastic bags
• Lesser cars on the road, use eco friendly cars only, fuel efficient cars
• Power your home with renewable energy
• Invest in energy efficient appliances
• Reduce water waste
• No food wastage
• Turn off power sockets when not in use
• Use less hot water
• Use kitchen towels instead of paper cloths
• Takeaway lunch in reusable containers/ lunchboxes
• Compost bins in our own home or garden
• Encourage others to conserve
• Eg. Adidas has now produced t shirts that are easily decomposed

Osborne - Parnes Problem Solving Process

*Given a problem and went through a process to solve it

The process: googling and researching on the problem to come to a conclusion

• Fact finding
• Generate good, informed ideas
• Develop knowledge and experience
• Get prepared
• Ideas finding (brainstorming)
• Generation of ideas
• Questioning the ideas eg. are they good ideas? Feasible? Practical? Etc
• Solutions finding
• Evaluation of ideas
• Adapting the ideas
• Implementation of ideas

Problem Solving

Everything is a problem to be solved

• A set of steps
• What are the questions you ask?
• What is the problem?
• What is the big picture?
• To think differently, anything can be an idea…
• How much time do you have to complete it? Deadlines.
• What is your rhythm?
• What resources do you need?

Creativity

• Eg. smell of coffee
• Brain decodes sensory data
• To understand what it is
• Forwards the data to regions
• Associate “smell” with specific memories (episodic - remember past events)
• Associate “smell” with types of coffee (semantic - based on facts)
• Creative people have strong and wide range of connections between different parts of the brain

Emotional and intellectual commitment

• Know the things you need to learn to do something
• *If you don’t know, seek it out
• Know the range of skills needed from one thing to another (intellectual curiosity)

Richard Feyman on problem solving:

• To be good at anything: what quality you must have? An intellectual curiosity trait.
• Be good at being puzzled (you can see puzzles in everyday phenomena)
• Look for patterns (interconnections)
• Develop a wide range of skills in solving these puzzles

Topic 6: Mining Interfaces

TRIZ

• Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
• Brainstorming:

• Psychologically based
• Unpredictable
• Produces unrepeatable results

• Based on logic and data (actively going out to seek data)
• Repeatable }
• Predictable } algorithmic approach
• Reliable }

3 Ms ??

• Minneapolis
• Mining
• Minerals

Specific problem                         

↓                                              Specific solution

General problem ➝ General solution ↑